The Forging of a Cage
by Nokomiss
Summary: She was an assassin on a hit against another mutant, the supposedly unkillable Victor Creed. Introduces Birdy into Evo. *complete*


The Forging of a Cage  
  
By Persephone  
  
AN: Well, this is an unusual comics character into Evo-verse fic, I think. I don't recall ever seeing this one done before. I'm a bit nervous about posting this one, because it is radically different from all my other Evo stuff, except perhaps Last Dance. So please, please, tell me if you liked it, or if I did anything majorly wrong. This is a one-shot fic, and I hope everybody enjoys this, so on with the disclaimer.  
  
Disclaimer: I don't own anything.  
  
  
  
***  
  
She came with the night, and hoped to see the day.  
  
As far as her hopes went, this was a rather typical one. After all, at the tender age of twenty three, she had been an assassin for five years. One thing she had learned quickly was that assassins worked more from luck and ruthlessness than anything else. The lifestyle was not quite what she had envisioned when she had read stories about thrilling escapades and lots of explosions.  
  
Mostly, she had learned, assassination involved waiting in small, uncomfortable quarters while waiting on the marked person to make an appearance, then take them down as quickly as ruthlessly as possible. No meaningful speeches, no nefarious plots. Just waiting and killing.  
  
She didn't even have the pleasure of pulling a trigger. No, guns were for the norms. She was a specialist, and her jobs were untraceable.  
  
She killed from within.  
  
She made it look like natural causes, sometimes heart failure, sometimes an aneurysm, but never anything violent. She was the quiet death that no one could trace, that no one saw coming, that no one could resist. She wondered, sometimes, what would happen if someone could resist her. Would she just be a failure? Or could she manage to achieve her goal without her normal tricks?  
  
Laughter broke her thoughts into a hundred broken shards. She looked up from her book to see a group of happy teenagers. A tall redhead casually leaned against a boy wearing red glasses, which she supposed were some kind of new fad. A shorter boy raced past them to get in front of them at the line at a fast food restaurant. They were normal teens, getting food and drinks at the food court at the mall.  
  
They sat down at a table not too far from her, and she watched them from the corner of her eye for a minute. Two more girls joined them, one pretty in pink, the other rebelling in black lace. They were good friends, teasing and joking and telling stories.  
  
She missed being simple like that. They would never know, she thought to herself, what it was like living on the outskirts of life. Associating only with the kind of people that mothers warned you against, and killing people for money to survive on. Well, survival was now ensured for her for a good long while, based solely on her blood money, but still she accepted jobs.  
  
She'd grown to like this lifestyle, though she occasionally caught a sense of nostalgia, like now, that made her wonder what might have been.  
  
She mentally shook herself. There was no time for chasing unicorns. She was supposed to be doing surveillance for the job she was on. This brief interlude in the mall was not helping her find her target.  
  
Her target, from what she'd read in her file, would not be caught dead in the mall.  
  
She got up, and strolled out of the food court, checking around to make sure no one seemed suspicious of her. The town was just large enough to keep anonymity, but not large enough to ensure that no one noticed her.  
  
She was an attractive woman, with long blond hair and blue eyes, and looked as innocent as ice cream on a Sunday afternoon. There was no reason to even think that anyone would be suspicious of here, even in light of the new anti-mutant campaigns that were now being broadcast over the news.  
  
She was a mutant, of course. Her job would be much harder if she was not. She wandered through the mall for a few minutes longer, stopping to check out some cute shoes on sale, before deciding it really was time to leave. She headed to the parking lot, and climbed into a nondescript car. Assassin's rule number fourteen: Always drive nondescript car on surveillance. No sense in getting noticed over something as trivial as a car.  
  
She pulled out the thin manilla envelope that contained all the information she had on her target. It told her his name, appearance, mutation, and a brief personality summary. These facts alone told her that she might be in a little over her head.  
  
Victor Creed was his name. He was huge, and mean-looking, and had a healing factor. He also had claws and some wicked looking teeth. He was described as a killing machine, a freelance mercenary who was currently under the employment of one Magneto. He ripped apart lives like they were nothing, destroyed the bodies and minds of any who dared cross his path, and she had agreed to kill him.  
  
She hoped that everything worked the way it was supposed to. There was no way she could handle this... Man? Beast? Monster? She wasn't sure which one, but she could not take any of them if her power didn't work. She'd never attempted to kill anyone with a healing factor before.  
  
She stuffed the papers back into the envelope, and took another glance at the picture she had been given. Creed was a strange looking one, she had to admit. Fangs, claws and eyes all resembled beast more than man, though his features were all too human. Long blond hair, several shades darker than her own wheat field blond, framed the face, and spilled over massive shoulders. He looked huge even in this picture, how would she handle seeing him in person?  
  
She finally started the car, and began to drive aimlessly around Bayville looking for any place that a huge blond feral mercenary might hang out. As quant shop after trendy store flew past, she realized that this might be a little more difficult then she had thought. Surely even small towns had the bad part of town, right? She was about to give up when she spotted a small sign hanging over the door of a dilapidated-looking building.  
  
Harry's.  
  
She checked out the parking lot. A few Harleys, some beat-up pick-ups, and a glistening, gorgeous Corvette Stingray.  
  
She parked in the lot of the dollar store across the street from Harry's, and pulled the file back out. Yes, there it was. A listing of known vehicles.  
  
The number one choice of cars by Victor Creed was a 1969 Corvette Stingray.  
  
She let out an excited squeak. What were the odds of two such cars being found in a town like Bayville? Not very likely, she'd wager. Now, to find out what kind of establishment Harry's was. If it was a bar, she'd pull on her leather jacket, and head in to scope out her target. If it was a strip club, then she'd wait until her target left. She was pretty sure it was just a bar. Due to the pure...quaintness of the town, she didn't think the town mothers would allow any place of lesser repute to be in business. It never hurt to check first, though.  
  
She decided to ask someone in the dollar store, since she was already parked in their lot. She went inside, and browsed through the shelves for a few minutes, picking out a pack of pens that she really didn't need. Small town folks got suspicious if you didn't at least look like you were considering to buy something, she knew from experience. One time, she's almost gotten busted during a hit due to a suspicious small town cashier.  
  
She made her way to the register, and set the pens down on the counter.  
  
"Good afternoon, did you find everything alright?" Asked the overly made up woman as she rang up the single item.  
  
"Yes, thank you." She made sure that her voice was a perfectly neutral accent that would not stand out as different in any way to the cashier. "I was wondering, though..." She trailed off the so she didn't seem too eager.  
  
"Yes?" The cashier inquired, smiling helpfully.  
  
"What sort of place is that across the street?"  
  
"Oh, Harry's?" The cashier said. "It's a bar. The PTO keeps trying to get it shut down, but all the men down at the plant insist it's a vital part of the community." The cashier sniffed at the idea. "More likely that they just want a place to get drunk without their wives nagging them." 'Probably," she agreed. She paid for her pens, and left the store.  
  
She drove around the block a few times so that the dollar store cashier would hopefully forget about her, then pulled into the small gravel lot next to Harry's. She parked a few trucks away from the sleek sports car, and sat for a few moments, gathering her wits.  
  
"Okay." She muttered to herself. "You can do this. Just go in, stake the place out, find the target, and wait for the right moment."  
  
A noise suddenly broke her concentration on her schedule. She looked up just in time to see a huge blond man stalk out of the side door. It was Creed.  
  
She had to go ahead and do this.  
  
She was a mutant. Her power was telepathy, which she used for these sort of distance killings. She was not a super powerful level of telepath, but her abilities were more than capable of blowing the mind of a normal person. Now she would find out if her powers worked on mutants as well.  
  
She made contact with Creed, his thoughts flying by in her mind....  
  
...time to get back to work...  
  
...should go back to freelancing, Magneto's a nutcase...  
  
...pretty frail in the car...  
  
She was startled to see herself in his minds eye for a moment. She then delved deeper into his mind, and was startled by the animalistic nature of his thoughts.  
  
...taste of blood and the satisfying rip of flesh off bone...  
  
...kill kill kill...  
  
...hunting is life...  
  
...wantkillbloodmurderrevelindeathandnaturebloodfleshbonewantnowkillkill...  
  
He looked at her again, suddenly, like he knew she was there. It was time, she had to drive her power into his mind now.  
  
She sent the total force of her psychic ability crashing into his brain, bent on destroying every thought, emotion, and primal urge. She made his heart want to stop beating, willed his lungs to stop taking in air, willed his brain to just stop functioning.  
  
She watched with baited breath as he fell to his knees, and clutched pathetically at his chest and head. For a long, long moment, she thought that she had succeeded in killing Victor Creed, and felt a sudden rush of sadness for this great hunting beast brought down in his prime. And then...  
  
Then she realized just how wrong she was.  
  
He rose, suddenly. Faster than she could watch, he leapt at her car, and drug her out of the door he wrenched open, the door she had carelessly forgotten to lock.  
  
He held her by the throat, sharp, wicked claws digging into the delicate skin of her neck. Tiny rivulets of blood began to trickle down to the pale collar of her shirt.  
  
"Lookie here, at the little birdy in a cage." He growled at her. She could not muster the control over her limbs to try and hit him, which she thought would be suicide anyways. A pitiful whimper escaped from her constricted throat, and pain was blossoming in her neck fast.  
  
He dropped her suddenly, and she could not react in time to stop her fall. A piece of gravel imbedded itself into her cheek as she hit the ground hard, her head bouncing painfully off the ground. She made another teeny wretched sound.  
  
"What did you do to me?" The massive mutant, Victor Creed, Sabretooth asked her.  
  
"Huh?" She was assessing her mental capabilities, but she was pretty sure that she had caused a temporary burnout of her psychic abilities when she'd hit him the first time.  
  
"You did something to my mind, frail." He continued.  
  
"I...I.. uh.. tried to kill you." She finally coughed out.  
  
"I caught that one, Birdy, as quick as I caught you." Replied Creed. Had she been looking up at him rather than at the small smear of blood on pavement her cheek had just risen from, she would have seen a grin filled with large, sharp teeth. In fact, if her mind had been less confused and dazed from the actions and violence of the past few minutes, she would have realized that Creed was acting very peculiar indeed.  
  
Cheerful, almost.  
  
"Come on, Birdy." Said Creed, almost gently. "I think I've come up with a use for you."  
  
"No...not that." She managed weakly.  
  
"Your mind powers, frail." Creed admonished. "I ain't felt this good since that slaughter in Tokyo."  
  
She could only look up at him, confused, as he half picked her up, and led her to his car. "Where..?" "My place. I'm keeping you, Birdy." Replied Creed as he started the engine.  
  
'My.." He interrupted her. "You won't be needing any of your stuff. You're mine now."  
  
She wanted to protest, but her head was aching too much for her to do anything but lean back in the seat. She heard Creed muttering one last thing before she fell into a deep sleep, "You done made my mind glow, Birdy. I'm keeping you."  
  
fin.  
  
  
  
****  
  
Reviews are greatly appreciated.  
  
~Persephone 


End file.
